Stories, insights and ideas from Northeastern's J-school

by Yan Wu | Ruggles Media

The city of Boston is seeing a continuing decline in violent crime and property crime over the past several years, but the issue of petty theft from cars is still a big problem.

Major crime in Boston dropped 9 percent between 2014 and 2015, bringing the figure to its lowest point in a decade, according to Boston police statistics. “We continue to see a steady decline in overall part one crime this year being down 7 percent, after seeing a 9 percent overall reduction last year,” Lt. Mike McCarthy said in an interview. He noted that auto theft is down by 9 percent so far this year. Last year auto theft in Boston saw an overall decline of 13 percent.

However, there were still 3,505 cases of larceny from motor vehicles over the period Nov. 1, 2015 to Oct. 31, 2016, according to crime incident reports provided by Boston Police Department.

See the graphic below for a sense of where larceny cases happened over the past year. And remember to take your belongings with you when park.